Menu

LEGO CUUSOO Site Performance and Opportunities for Improvement

On Thursday, we began receiving unusually high volumes of traffic from dedicated Minecraft fans checking out and supporting the Minecraft project on LEGO CUUSOO.The traffic was greater than our servers were prepared to handle, and the site ground to a halt.

First, a big thank-you to everyone for the interest and enthusiasm. Here at LEGO, we’re also excited about the possibility of a Minecraft product line. Keep the votes rolling in!

Through this process, we gained some experience, so now we’ll share with you a bit of what we’ve done and address your questions and concerns.

LEGO CUUSOO is in BetaIf you’re new to LEGO CUUSOO, please understand that the site is currently in “Open Beta” and we’re still making significant improvements. We’ve decided to allow the community to grow during this time so people can share their ideas and gain support while we continue to test and improve the site with actual traffic and users. That said, we know there are still some bugs and that the experience is not entirely optimized. We’re thankful for your enthusiasm and your patience.

Server MaintenanceWe took the site down twice for maintenance to expand the number of servers hosting LEGO CUUSOO so that the site can handle loads like this. Our team will also be making some improvements to the database so it can better handle the volume of requests. You should see that overall site performance remains strong, even if we’re experiencing high volume.

Improving the Support and Sign-Up ProcessFor the amount of traffic the Minecraft project received, it didn’t gain nearly as many actual supporters (votes on CUUSOO) as one might have expected. We know this frustrated more than a few Minecraft fans, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Here is why we believe the number of supporters was lower than expected:

The high traffic slowed the site’s response time and prevented pages from fully loading. As a result many users could not sign up for an account and gave up.

The landing page can be more clear on what to do. Facebook and Twitter are able to generate high volumes of traffic, but users will only take action if the page makes it clear what they need to do. The page as it stands may cause people to think that a Like or a Tweet is all that’s needed to register support.

The sign-up process itself is cumbersome. There are more clicks and screens than are necessary, which will naturally lead to users “dropping off” or failing to complete the process.

The social sign-in buttons aren’t working properly (“Sign in with Facebook” and “Sign in with Twitter”). This improvement alone would yield more successfully created accounts.

Some users are not receiving the activation email. We have received several support emails and Get Satisfaction posts about this, and are looking into the issue.

We’ll be fixing the obvious bugs, and prioritizing the changes that we believe will have the greatest impact at improving the ratio of site visitors to project supporters. You might not see improvements overnight, but this is one of our highest priorities at LEGO CUUSOO and we are actively working on it.

Why don’t Facebook Likes and Tweets count as Support?LEGO CUUSOO is not just about seeing how many people like an idea, but it also helps the LEGO Group learn about who the audience is for a particular idea and gather some feedback from them so we can make smarter decisions about the ideas we decide to produce as products. We also believe that supporting a project requires some small commitment on the part of the user. By creating an account and answering our questions, you show us you’re seriously interested in the idea becoming a product.

For this reason, Facebook Likes and Tweets don’t count as actual Supporters for a LEGO CUUSOO project. However, we know that there are improvements to be made to the new user signup process and the process of supporting your first project, and we are confident that tackling these things will increase the conversion rate into an acceptable range (in our experience, typically 4-7% of visitors).

Issues? Feedback? Use the Feedback TabWe hope that this post addresses your questions and concerns around the LEGO CUUSOO experience. If you have any other issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us directly using the Feedback tab at the right of any page on LEGO CUUSOO. We collect all user feedback, feature requests, and bug reports using Get Satisfaction, so we can see them all in one place, prioritize, and respond accordingly.

Thank you again for your interest in the possibility of LEGO Minecraft products. We’re thrilled to have you as visitors to LEGO CUUSOO and we’re looking forward to improving the experience for you.

6 thoughts on “LEGO CUUSOO Site Performance and Opportunities for Improvement”

I feel happy everytime there has an announcement from Lego Cuusoo Team. Keep inform us the latest news! Well, if there has any news on #002? When will be available in store? Is it again just availble in Japan?Please let us know soon:)

I love the idea, I made a project using my Lego Design by me ship – I’d love to see thousands of them built, I actually have enough similarly themed models in digital format I could make a whole Lego Theme with them !http://lego.cuusoo.com/ideas/view/5384